Photoshop

Save as PDF | Print

By Scot Hacker, Scott Squire

Introduction

Photoshop is the premiere tool for working with digital images of any kind. It can be used to do anything you can do in a traditional darkroom, and much more. Images may originate from a digital camera, from scans, from stock photo libraries, or from existing Web-ready artwork. Photoshop can be used to work on line art as well as photographic imagery.

Photoshop is a tremendously powerful collection of tools, and offers the user many different ways of manipulating images. Most operations can be carried out successfully using any of three or four different tools. Because of this flexibility, Photoshop is as complicated as it is versatile. Users are faced with myriad menus, tools, palettes, panels and options.

For all its complexity, Photoshop's basics can be mastered quite quickly. This tutorial will attempt to acquaint the first-time user with some of the most basic tools suitable for preparing digitized photos for Web use. When you open a document in Photoshop, you should see the menu bar along the top of the screen, a Tool Option bar just below that, the main Tool Palette to the left of your image document, and the image itself. There will likely also be a number of other panels looming toward the right of the screen, which for the purposes of this tutorial may be ignored.

For the purposes of this tutorial, we'll assume you've already acquired the raw images you need to manipulate as digital files in a common format such as .PSD, .TIF, .JPG, .GIF, .PNG, .TGA, etc.

Comments

1) Julian D, February 22, 2008 at 9:49 a.m. [Link]

Thumb Up!

2) delia cristea, May 12, 2008 at 1:11 a.m. [Link]

Thank you for the good and understandable tutorial. I have had problems using the features of Photoshop because of the very hard interface this tool has. I also had problems regarding resizing with Photoshop. I wasn't quite satisfied with the results that I got. A friend of mine suggested reshade as a great resizing tool and I must agree with it. this tool that I found at http://reshade.com offers high quality results. You can try it out online for free and I would be happy to receive feedback about it.

3) Emmanuel Eichler, July 31, 2008 at 5 p.m. [Link]

For those who would like to practice their photoshop skills, I'd like to invite them to sign up at http://photoshopcontest.com.
We've been maintaining and updating the site for a while now and have daily contests for you. If you have questions feel free to ask in our forums.

4) Castle Steps, September 23, 2008 at 8:53 a.m. [Link]

I am currently learning how to use photoshop for my job at a hotel in Prague ( http://castlesteps.com )and I found this tutorial very helpful. Does anyone know of another website with more in-depth tutorials, especially ones which focus on the use of filters?
Thanks

5) Mihai Udrea, October 4, 2008 at 9:18 a.m. [Link]

I am always learning something new about Photoshop. For me, Bert Monroy is the best source for learning through practice. I also try to put together fast ways of working with Adobe Photoshop on my website http://www.myphotoshoptutorial.com. Another great source is NAPP and you should check it out.

Post a comment

Login to post a comment.